A Holy Hoard Acumulación sagrada

A Holy Hoard

Story and photos by Sherry Mazzocchi

The artist Rachel Libeskind at work.Photo: AJHS

One woman’s holy trash is another’s treasure.

In many religions, objects containing the names of God are sacred and cannot be destroyed. In keeping with Jewish tradition, such items, rather than being discarded, are kept in a special place known as a “genizah,” or a tomb for texts.

Solomon Schechter unearthed the most famous genizah in modern times. In 1896, the Cambridge University Talmudic scholar met friends who had purchased fascinating ancient documents from a dealer in Egypt. They were from a genizah in which Torah scrolls, books, contracts, lists, magical incantations and pretty much anything written in Hebrew letters since the 11th century had been gathered over years. By the end of World War I, Schechter hauled 193,000 documents from Cairo’s Ben Ezra synagogue to Cambridge and began a study that spanned nearly a thousand years of Jewish history.

Libeskind took outdated and worn books from the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS). She created concrete casts from sacred 400-year-old Jewish texts, worn Bar Mitzvah prep books and Braille Torahs. The resulting interactive exhibit echoes a famous photograph of Schechter sitting in the midst of a jumbled mass of manuscripts.

Libeskind created concrete casts of sacred texts.

In a performance at opening night on Wed., Sept. 21st, the artist spoke of a dream she had in 2005. She was standing in a huge warehouse filled with shelves filled with objects she had lost or forgotten – including keys, beloved stuffed animals, beautiful dresses and shoes, and her mother’s jade pendant.

In that moment, she realized forgotten items are a better narrative of life than things that remain. It started her thinking about creating archives of lost things.

“In some ways these archives are much, much richer, much, much fuller,” she stated.

There is also an anti-archive, she said, of missed connections, emails never sent, text messages that have never been examined, and people never met. “And the memories that you forgot and there is no one to remind you that you ever once had them. Where did all of that stuff go?”

Libeskind, daughter of architect Daniel Libeskind, told The Manhattan Times that this project was a departure from her normal method of working. “I usually treat objects with tyranny,” she said. “Usually I rip things apart and mess everything up and treat things as though I’m a tyrant. It was an interesting experience having to work around that, having to really respect the objects.”

Solomon Schechter at work in the old University LibraryPhoto: Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

The items were returned to the AJHS after the casts were created.

Rachel Lithgow, the AJHS’s Executive Director, said Liebeskind’s work also calls into question not only what is sacred but how do you interact with the sacred and what do you do when you have duplicates of it?

“I love the contemporary and the antiquity piece; I love that she is creating new work out of an archive that starts in the 16th century,” Lithgow said. “It’s kind of an amazing old and new combination.”

The exhibit “Holy Trash: My Genizah” is on display at the American Jewish Historical Society, which is located at15 West 16th Street in Manhattan,through December 2016. For more information, please visit www.ajhs.org or call 212.294.6160.